ABSTRACT
The Polish-Lithuanian nobility on the one hand loudly proclaims its warrior virtue and its willingness to fight and die for faith and freedom. Yet in practice seeking to avoid war whenever possible can be resolved by setting the question of whether or not the Commonwealth should go to war within the context of constitutional disputes over the location of sovereignty in the Commonwealth that raged throughout the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Over the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the legal rights of non-Catholics were steadily curtailed, progressively excluding them from the Commonwealth's public life. In 1632, the construction of new non-Catholic churches was forbidden, while over the course of the seventeenth century Arians, apostates, Quakers and Mennonites were all banned from the Commonwealth. The process of legal, political and social Catholicization was matched in the Commonwealth's political discourse during this period.
